Alcide De Gasperi

De Gasperi built Italy's Christian Democracy into the party that governed for nearly fifty years, and he did it by refusing to be the Church's instrument: he governed with smaller secular parties even when the 1948 landslide gave him an outright majority in the Chamber. He chose NATO, the Marshall Plan and land reform in the south, and was a founding voice for European integration. Pope Pius XII's pressure for a deal with the far right in Rome's 1952 local elections, which he resisted, shows the tension clearly.